Filmmakers Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham tell Screen about the challenges of shaping thousands of hours of footage in award-winning Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land.
There are moments in No Other Land, the award-winning Palestinian-Israeli documentary about the Israeli demolition of villages in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, where the despair is overwhelming. We see the weary cynicism of a mother desperate to build a room for her son paralysed by an Israeli soldier’s bullet, and the exhausted desperation of the film’s protagonist (and co-director) Basel Adra, who has been documenting the destruction of his community for most of his life.
“People ask a lot where I get the hope or strength,” says Adra. “I don’t know if it’s strength. It’s hard to talk about these things when living this reality. What keeps me moving is the community not giving up, we have a steadfastness facing these horrific conditions. We’re not strong, we don’t have hope and we don’t have power against this oppressive machine which is doing whatever it can to uproot us from our land. The camera is the one and only tool we have to show and document the evidence.”
That evidence totals some 2,000 hours of footage from phones and cameras shot over four years by Adra, fellow activist Hamdan Ballal and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham — who are all credited as directors along with Israeli cinematographer Rachel Szor — as well as archive material shot by Adra, his father and other activists over the past two decades. Adra and Abraham had both been posting stories about the demolitions online but when they met in 2019, they soon realised the kind of citizen journalism they had been doing up to then was not enough.
“In this area of the West Bank, the policy of expelling communities is spread out over a long period of time,” says Abraham. “[With] journalism, you tend to take snapshots of moments of violence. But for those moments to have meaning, for them to tell the story of how the military occupation is expelling this Palestinian population, you have to compress time and a documentary allows you to do that. That was the first goal, a political goal.
“The occupation of the West Bank has been reported on for so many years, sometimes people get numb to it, and [with] a film you can make people see something they couldn’t see before,” continues Abraham. “And then there is the human reason — it’s one thing to read the reports of another destruction of a village, but when you see a mother looking at her house being destroyed, you get something much deeper.”
One of the challenges the filmmakers faced was distilling thousands of hours of footage into a coherent and compelling film that would work not just as a political piece, but also as an authentic portrait of a community.
“We wanted to tell the story of Masafer Yatta and how the military is trying to expel it and open the door to the Israeli settlers,” says Adra. “We show that through home demolitions and settler violence, who say everything we build is illegal. And, through the relationship between me and Yuval, we wanted to show the power imbalance between Palestinians and Israelis, how politicians deny the discrimination against Palestinians, how Yuval has freedom and rights and I haven’t, how he can travel freely and I can’t.”
“The challenge,” adds Abraham, “was how to make it all fit together. Our editing consultant Anne Fabini was a huge help with that.”
Fabini was one of the professionals the film’s directors took advice from when they participated in the Close Up programme after receiving some initial funding from human rights organisations. Further backing came from the IDFA Bertha Fund and Sundance Industry, and Norwegian producers Fabien Greenberg and Bard Kjoge Ronning.
The filmmakers remained mindful of the potential pitfall of monotony — a repetition of confrontations between the inhabitants and the Israeli settlers and military — even though that is the harsh reality faced by this community.
“To prevent that, the film has a chronology and inside that chronology we tried to select scenes that are different,” says Abraham. “There was a huge archive in Basel’s phone and it’s just violence, violence, violence, and so it was a challenge to make it into an escalating story. It was important to show the escalation [of events building up to] the destruction of the elementary school and the Israelis filling the well with cement and cutting off the water lines.”
The film contrasts those shocking scenes with quiet moments of children playing before bedtime, family meals and heartfelt conversations between Adra and Abraham, often at night under the soft glow of street lamps, mostly filmed in a fly-on-the-wall style by Szor.
“It’s a political film and we want a political achievement from it — how we’re struggling for homes and education and clean water, and how someone is killed just for wanting to keep an electricity generator,” says Adra. “But we also wanted to show the beautiful moments in the community and its traditions because it is the story of a community just like any other.”
“The film sees what Basel sees when he was gathering evidence — the phone calls telling him that soldiers and bulldozers are coming, him and others running to the sites, being chased and attacked, the ground, his feet,” says Abraham. “We wanted to get the audience to feel as though they’re there.”
Asking questions
No Other Land is not shy of turning the lens on the filmmakers and the filmmaking process itself. In one conversation, Adra laughs at Abraham’s naïveté at thinking his journalism will have an effect in a matter of days. “You have to get used to failing,” he tells the Israeli. In another scene, a foreign news team interviews the mother of the paralysed young man and, as she questions the point of the news report, it is easy to wonder if the filmmakers of No Other Land asked themselves the same question.
“She is one example of Palestinians not believing in the human rights work, the court appeals and the international community’s power because they don’t see it helping them,” says Adra. “People ask me, ‘Do you think if you write about our son, you’ll stop them from doing it to another family?’ I ask myself that question a lot. The reality on the ground is changing in the opposite direction, even though the movie is doing well and people want to watch it.”
Indeed, following its success at the Berlinale — where it won the Panorama audience and documentary awards — No Other Land has picked up prizes at a slew of international festivals, was named best documentary by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Gothams, and is nominated at both the European Film Awards and the Independent Spirits. It has sold, via Austria’s Autlook, to territories including the UK, Spain, France and Japan with Cinetic Media handling North American sales. It opened in the UK and Ireland through Dogwoof in early November, grossing £74,000 ($94,000) to December 1.
No Other Land also earned a warm reception from the villagers of Masafer Yatta. “They felt its importance,” says Adra. “But they were also laughing at the archive video footage of themselves, which we had digitised and they hadn’t seen for 20 years.”
The directors stopped filming just after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel because the risks escalated alarmingly and villagers began leaving at a faster pace.
“It’s too dangerous to move around now with a camera,” says Adra. “I’ve been collecting testimonies from people who have been caught and tortured for having photos or comment on war in Gaza or WhatsApp messages on their phones. It’s got much worse.”
Meanwhile, although he has faced death threats from militant Israelis after his speech in Berlin asking for a ceasefire, Abraham worries “for the Palestinians, for the [Israeli] hostages, for the future in this land. We are waiting with dread. [October 7] felt like a new chapter was starting, which we don’t know how it will end.”
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